Boulder City/Hoover Dam Museum

By late 1934, tourists were coming by the thousands to gather on the stone parapets constructed by the Reclamation Bureau on the Nevada cliff side (their sandstone masonry handcrafted by Dogface Charlie Rose’s unsung Negro crew), and goggle at the intricately choreographed ballet of cableways, concrete buckets and workmen.” Page 347

In Real Life:

Even during construction – as Michael Hiltzik says in Colossus, tourists crashed Black Canyon to get a look at the damming of the Colorado River. And they’re still coming. On my first visit to Boulder City, I noticed there’s a Boulder City/Hoover Dam Museum at Boulder Dam Hotel. I especially like the way they put a slash in the name. Anyway, I put my sister, Mary Ann, in charge of checking it out – mostly because when we arrived she told me she’d been up all night – working. I didn’t think she could handle the pace I was going to have to keep to get through town in my allotted time and I particularly didn’t think she could handle the heat. So – I pushed her toward the air-conditioned museum and headed out into the HOT summer day. When I picked her up she didn’t have much to say about the museum. When I pressed further, she said she’d fallen asleep in the little movie. So, when I went back with my husband – he can NEVER RESIST A MUSEUM – we spent a lot of time there and found it does a pretty good job of telling the story of the building of the dam – and particularly of showing you what life was like in Boulder City, in town and in Black Canyon, over 80 years ago.

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Rush of Reality

It's a crazy kind of rush that pushes me to seek out and find the settings of the books I read. The words create an image in my mind but that's not enough. I want to see it in real life. And when I do, when I arrive at a place - a town, a street, a beach - there is a moment, an adjustment, while I reconcile what's in my imagination to what’s actually right there in front of me. It's mindscape meets landscape. It's a rush. I call it the rush of reality. More

Setting

|ˈsetiNG|noun
1 the place or type of surroundings where something is positioned or where an event takes place: cozy waterfront cottage in a peaceful country setting.
• the place and time at which a play, novel, or film is represented as happening: short stories with a contemporary setting.